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Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Eulogy for the Northeast

In an early morning fog on May 10, I
set off down the street with my little Honda packed to the gills. The
familiar houses disappeared in my rearview mirror, and the familiar
road turned into a familiar highway. All this familiarity was made
new by the feeling in my chest that I was not going to stop driving
until 2,300 miles had passed under my tires. I would stop for sleep
and gas and food of course, but I would be in the dreamstate of
traveling for thousands of miles, and when I awoke, I would be
somewhere entirely different. The soft green light and rolling hills
and warm fog of New England would be replaced by red sandstone desert
and rabbitbrush and towering mountains, and I would have another pin
to place on the map of my life, another place to call home. I'm ready
to stay somewhere for a while this time, I tell myself, and the
western slope of Colorado sounds as ideal as anywhere. But as I drove
through New York state, struck by its quiet, early morning beauty, I
found myself again holding up the mirror of the place I'm choosing to
go against the place where I'm from and trying, again, to reconcile
my love for two disparate places. The West and the East.

Among the super-fit outdoorsy types who
tend to settle in the mountain West, it's common to disparage the
relatively tame, settled East. The rivers are bigger in the West, the
wildlife is grander and the landscapes are more dramatic, but more
importantly there's the issue of accessibility. More than anything
else, it's what sets the east and west apart. As much as 80 percent
of western states are publicly owned by the Forest Service, the
Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, leading to
large stretches of unbroken land open to outdoor pursuits like
climbing, camping and paddling. In New England, the majority of land
is privately held. As little as 20 percent belongs to the public.

It's difficult in the Northeast to pull
over by the side of the road and simply walk into the woods. As
Robert Frost asked, Whose woods are these? The culture of the
outdoors is also more genteel (think New Hampshire's stately AMC
lodges compared to California dirtbag climbing camps), and we have
more people crammed into a smaller space. If you haven't been here –
or if you've only been to Boston and New York – you might easily be
mistaken in thinking that everything north of D.C. and east of
Chicago is one big over-populated sprawl.

But though I don't know if I see myself
settling in New England, I'm quick – too quick – to defend my
homeland. I bristle when anyone says anything negative about the
East. True, New England lacks the large-scale wilderness and outdoor
opportunities of the West, but I think it's unfairly maligned. For
example: while more than 80 percent of old-growth forest in the
Pacific Northwest has been razed by loggers – and that which
remains is checkerboarded and left to a few protected reserves –
New England is recovering from past abuses and is now 80 percent
forested. Looking at a map of forest cover in the U.S., the region I
call home is more lushly covered in green than anywhere else in the
country. Some of this can be attributed to climate and an influx of
people to urban centers, but it's also due to a sense of
environmentalism and the actions of private landowners who care about
their land. In the Northwest, the Forest Service needs to make money
and does so by handing large parcels of public land over to private
logging companies who are driven by profit. (Elsewhere in the West,
it's private mining or oil companies.) While the straggly second- and
third-growth forests of New England don't begin to compare with the
majestic old-growth of the Pacific Northwest, it is more
consistent, abutting people's homes and yards, stretching along
roadsides, spreading through valleys and over mountains. It isn't
relegated to a few protected strongholds. It's part of the places
where people actually live.

And therein lies another of New
England's strengths: the population is more evenly distributed. Many
cities in the West were planned around water sources and habitable
land, and populations are centered in big cities that radiate outward
in ever-widening concentric rings. In the East, where the land is
more forgiving, towns and roads sprung up in random disorder, a
meandering, bleeding network that doesn't revolve around one large
city but rather dissipates itself across the land. On one hand, this
means fewer unbroken tracts of wilderness, but on the other, it means
that people live more closely with the land. What we lack in raw
wildness we make up for in intimacy, in having mountains and hollows
and backroads that are ours to care for and explore. Just because
land is privately owned doesn't mean it's off-limits – but you
often have to be a local to know about it. New England isn't a place
that's particularly welcoming for those who are just passing through;
it wasn't built on mobility or transience, but on staying and
spreading roots.

Soon, I'll be writing for a publication
founded on the unique identity of the American West. I'm excited to
explore new places and build a community and learn more about
magazine journalism. But I'm also worried that working on stories
emphasizing the singularity of the West will cause my instinctive
defensiveness of my homeland to kick in more strongly and the line
between East and West to become more defined, and I will have
to live with part of my heart in one place and part in another.

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About Me

I'm Krista. I write stories about the intersection of people, places and nature. Formally, I'm a contributor at High Country News, a non-profit environmental news magazine once called "a scrappy institution that produces some of the finest journalism in the American West." My work has also been published in Slate, Orion, Alaska magazine, New Zealand Wilderness magazine, the Denver Post, Adventure Journal, and a number of other newspapers and websites. See more at www.kristaleelanglois.com.